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Yahoo has followed the path of the other big social web players in announcing its first foray into an open platform. Yahoo has announced the Yahoo! Open Strategy which will allow aspiring developers and small companies to build applications on top of the data, social connections, and traffic provided by Yahoo and its multitude of properties.

Yahoo is one of the founding members of Open Social, launched by Google and commonly described as a "more open" alternative to Facebook's application platform. Generally, applications written on Open Social can be run on any other site implementing the technology. Big players in the social networking space like MySpace, Hi5, Ning, and LinkedIn have signed on to the project, and some have already rolled out some implementations of the framework.

Yahoo's rollout is unique due to the vast amount of data and virtual property made available to the aspiring developer willing to write applications on the Yahoo platform.

Through Yahoo's new social API, developers will have access to contacts exposed through a user's Yahoo address book, Yahoo Messenger, and Yahoo Go. In addition, developers can consume and expose actions in their applications through a framework that Yahoo calls "updates" which can be tagged with a time, location, subject, and relationship. The point here being that developers should be able to create compelling and interesting web applications built on top of Yahoo data and Yahoo users, their "social connections," and their online activities.

Are Yahoo users going to flock to Yahoo applications like Facebook users have? In its current incarnation it seems unlikely. Facebook's platform, and to a larger extent, MySpace's Open Social implementation, banks on the fact that their user base is young, technologically-savvy, and generally cognizant of new technology. For the most part, Yahoo's demographic skews more toward those who have yet to really discover the social web and sites like MySpace and Facebook.

Furthermore, and perhaps most important, Facebook was engineered from the ground up to promote applications built on its platform. Yahoo has over ten years of UI momentum to overcome this, in addition to educating its reluctant users about these new products. Perhaps Yahoo's biggest hurdle, however, is the issue of developer motivation and compensation. Small companies and individuals flocked to create Facebook applications because they were able to monetize their success through advertisements. That doesn't yet seem to be the case on the new Yahoo! platform, and we're betting there will not be significant uptake until Yahoo finds a way to reward developers' hard work with cold hard cash.